Combating Terrorism & Crime: Emergency Services as Information Outposts

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911 emergency call center in New York City. Photo: NY City

Methodological recording of emergency-call services provide a wealth of information that can help improve public safety, highlight evolving trends in public safety and security and support crime investigations. Historically, reviewing enough calls to identify performance trends and challenges has been a manual task that many centers didn’t have the resources to fulfill. Likewise, public safety operations lack formalized quality and analysis processes – such as those available through integrated voice/screen recording – leaving them with only a limited view of what is really happening across their operations.

The photo below shows a geographical information system (GIS) processing of 911 call records shows the areas most prone to criminal activity. Photo: ESRI
911 emergency call center in New York City. Photo: NY City

The availability of patented speech analytics solutions developed by Verint for the intelligence community enabled the recent introduction of recording and analytic services to assist public safety agencies, performing trend spotting to help reduce crime and improve quality of life for citizens, by leveraging 9-1-1 interactions. The service utilizes Verint Impact 360 Speech Analytics system, to enable law enforcement agencies to obtain call records and events gathered by Public Safety Centers such as 911, and mine recorded emergency calls to uncover key facts for incident investigations.

The new system provides automatically transcribed emergency contact audio, into data that can be mined for intelligence. This new capability enable emergency centers to identify opportunities that can make their work more efficient and effective, while proactive trend spotting tools can uncover issues before they become widespread problems. The software empowers users to uncover insights within all related recorded calls through guided, visual search tools. This will not only support public safety agencies by helping investigators uncover facts during emergency situations, but also identify staff training and process improvement opportunities.

NICE Systems is offering the ‘Nice Inform’ suite of data mining applications to provide central incident information management solution by processing communications monitoring information related to specific incidents, including the acquisition, location, association and reconstruction of conversations that took place over the radio or telephone. consolidation of voice calls, (telephony, radio, VoIP), video, and tracking information, all displayed over a digital map, relative to the crime scene, with relevant photos and video clips, incident reports, mug-shots, emails, and more. Such tools provide for faster scenario reconstruction, accident investigation and post-incident analysis offering greater insight, and improved response. The system extracts a complete, unified, chronological, multimedia-rich history of incidents used for debriefing, and event analysis by homeland security and first responders.

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